On this trip I found a nice paperback copy of Richard Flanagan's Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
Flanagan's other majorly well-received work, Gould's Book of Fish, is one of my favorite books ever, and I've picked up and read over the years two others of his (Wanting and The Unknown Terrorist) at our erstwhile local Dollar Bookstore solely on the merits of Gould's... They weren't as good of the ...Book of Fish, but that's unfair, as few books are.
Having finished Narrow Road to the Deep North, I'd like to report that it is as good, but in a different way. Structurally the storytelling may be superior, and as the back of the paperback says, "This is the book Richard Flanagan was born to write." That's true.
I was under the impression, gauging from reviews, that it was a brutal look at a Japanese POW camp in Burma as orders came down from the Emperor to build the un-buildable railroad from Siam to the west and hasten both the planned invasion of British-held India and continue a supply chain to the western-front Japanese troops, a supply chain that had been cutoff from the seas by the American military.
I was surprised then as the sections of the book unfolded and the Camp took a while at which to arrive. After I'd finished the book, I went back through and reexamined the opening chapter, and then set about marking off the five sections in my own pencil. I'd mark my own titular label, the pages it covered, how many pages are in the section, a brief recap of the section's content, and even the previous section's beginning and ending pages. Check out the page for Part III, labeled by me as "The Camp/The Line":
I did this to illuminate a few things for myself in the middle of trying to scratch out my own first novel. I used it mostly as a guide for pacing.
The return to the first chapter of a book about suffering, deceit, infidelity, leadership, and history's ramifications was fully enlightening. I marveled how in the 52 pages Flanagan sets up each one of the character types and characters---outside of Major Nakamura. Everything's there. The introduction of our hero, Dorrigo Evans, happens in the very beginning, and we get a look at him as a boy--oversized and confident. We meet his brother and see some shenanigans between Tom, the brother, and a neighbor's wife. The section jumps around through time effortlessly, as we get the post-war and now sorta famous Dorrigo as he's lamenting having to write the forward of book based on a collection of prison camp paintings while also not being sure why he's still keeping an affair going with his mistress, the wife of a fellow surgeon.
We then get glimpses of Dorrigo and Amy, from before being shipped out, and it seems like Dorry and Amy may have had something. We get an internal issue from older Dorry about one of his prison camp soldiers, Darky Gardiner.
So far, no prison camp itself stuff.
The next section is nearly a hundred ages, and chronicles Dorrigo and Amy's torrid love affair, and his constant self-loathing through it all, Amy being the much-younger wife of someone who qualifies as Dorrigo's uncle.
Over a hundred-and-fifty pages in, and we finally get to the Camp. Here we get Nakamura and Darky, Colonel Kota and all the boys on the Line. Here we meet Dorrigo Evans as the "Big Fella", soon enough in charge as commanding officer and reluctantly having to choose which men to send on one-way tickets to the reaper. The scenes of brutality, of starvation, of tropical ulcers and uncontrollable diarrhea during the monsoons of Siam and Burma, of the shabu-addicted Nakamura (shabu is Japanese meth-amphetamine), are painted with stomach-churning power.
The fourth section covers the random lives of the survivors in the intervening years up until their deaths, and how each of them were severely affected by the Camp, including Nakamura in the ashy remnants of Tokyo. The fifth and last section is mostly the same, but we get the end of Dorrigo and Nakamura and even Amy, the revelation about Darky, and even a big forest fire action sequence.
Heartbreak and loss and pain are the pieces of life that literature can best showcase over the course of work, and here, coming full circle with the first section, an idea is driven home masterfully. Coming in at under 400 pages also shows off Flanagan's abilities.
This book is a masterpiece.
Odd note: there is much discussion by characters both Aussie and Japanese about poetry, and each of the section markers that I drew on have tiny fragments of poems. Even the book's title, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is taken from the travelogue writing of Japanese master Basho. I find it interesting that this masterpiece by Flanagan takes as a title the exact same name of another, much older well-known work.
That's interesting because the exact same thing happened with his other masterpiece, Gould's Book of Fish. That work is named for the original William Gould's Australian-prison project that carries the same name and exists in the Aussie National Archives as a treasure.
Symmetry of some kind I suppose...
I admire your scheme for parsing Narrow Road out, and the thoroughness of your effort. I didn't do any such thing in my review; I mainly dwelled on the magisterial language, and the extent to which Flanagan went to recount the horror of building the murderous railway. It seems to me in retrospect that Dorrigo's character is meant to carry some metaphoric weight, or mission ... the scenes of his sensual conquest are written in a timeless, placeless way that almost invokes floating weightless in space. And then the ghastly scenes in building he railway ... no more down-to-earth can they be, so down-to-earth as to be literally buried. Then, his rootless postwar life, where he finds he cannot believe in anything ... obviously there is a journey here, and I clearly need to re-read his statements and attitudes in this latter section.
ReplyDeleteAlso, we concur wholeheartedly that this is a masterpiece.